Since the team moved to more frequent updates throughout each year, significant improvements are more spread out.

In particular, the UV and Modeling Toolkits are miles ahead of where they were. In the last couple of years, there have been major improvements to Maya. This says something about the quality of Maya for use in production.

Additionally, studios choose to use Maya for their productions. It seems to me that achieving that level of success in an extremely competitive market saturated with high maintenance customers would require a great deal of skill and intestinal fortitude. After all, Maya has been the industry standard for more than a decade and is used by nearly all of the significant studios. I would hesitate denigrating the Maya team, however. All of these products are very good and all of these products contain issues. I have also used C4D, Houdini and Blender. I am mostly a hobbyist who has owned licenses to Maya, 3ds Max, and Modo for more than 5 years. Only a fool would expect anything better. One thing gets 'slightly less bad', and then it is followed by such new absurd disaster.

Even if they put some effort in one version they have proven again and again that the effort is not maintained. The team and company behind Maya is not going to magically transform. I have given up this game of 'maybe things will get better if I wait'. Don't expect the 2019 release to save the situation with Maya.

Maya 2019 autodesk